CHAPTER XIV

Mitsos returned home after the destruction of Dramali's army, arriving there the day after the Capsina had left. Suleima met him at the gate.

"Oh, welcome, Mitsos!" she cried, in a hurry. "And I, too, have seen her. She has been here."

"I seem of little account," said Mitsos; "but who may 'she' be?"

"When you talk of 'she,' do I not know whom you mean? You are less wise than I. And she saved my life and that of the littlest."

"The Capsina?" cried Mitsos.

"Yes, slow one."

And Suleima told him how she had fled to Tiryns, and how the Capsina had concealed her and the little one till the Turks had been routed; only she did not tell that which it was not for Mitsos to know.

"So come in now, Mitsos, and you shall eat and wash--and indeed you are as dusty as a hen--and in the evening you shall go to Nauplia, and thank her, if so be you are pleased at what she did."

Suleima went to the bedroom and laid out for him a clean fustanella and shirt, the one on which the Capsina had used her unaccustomed needle, and went out smiling to herself. In a little while came Mitsos's voice, calling her, and back she went very grave.

He held out a ragged sleeve, with stitches loose and large.

"I have a fine housewife," said he, very sarcastically.

Suleima examined the shirt.

"Indeed, it was torn much," she said; "but it does not seem to me badly mended."

Mitsos shrugged his shoulders hugely.

"It is as I have always said," he remarked; "a woman cannot even mend a shirt."

"Who mends your things when you are cruising, Mitsos?" she asked.

"I don't know. They are always well done. The Capsina is excepted; she can do everything."

Suleima could not keep the corners of her mouth from breaking down, and next moment she burst out laughing.

"It was she did who it," she said; "I swear to you it was she."

Mitsos had half slipped off the shirt, but on it went again in a twinkling.

"It is not badly mended," said Suleima, still laughing, "but I could do it better. Take another one, Mitsos. I will mend this again. Ah, it is less good than I thought. See how big and bad are those stitches. Oh, it is shocking! Off with it! I will not have for a husband one they would think was a beggar."

Mitsos looked at her darkly and sideways.

"This, no doubt, is the best way to mend a shirt, though I know nought of shirt-mending," he said. "Do not be too proud to take example, Suleima. See how fine and big are the stitches. Why, she would mend ten shirts while you mended one."

"Even so," said Suleima; "indeed, if she mended a dozen while I did one, it would not surprise me, or more than that even. And see how convenient on a hot day like this; the wind will blow coolly on your arm through the stitches."

Mitsos broke out laughing.

"She shall see me in it," he cried. "And, oh little wife, I am pleased to be home again. Dust and hot wind were the drink in the Larissa, so see that there is wine to fill even me. Oh, I love wine!" he cried.

"Ah, it is for the wine alone you would be home again," said Suleima, with the light of love returned in her eyes.

Mitsos bent down from his great height, and put his face to hers.

"Yes, for the wine alone," he said, softly, "the wine of many things. And are you not wine to my soul, my own dear one?"

Soon after they had dinner, and, dinner finished, Mitsos set off into Nauplia. The _Revenge_ was fretting at her anchor in the land-breeze as a horse, eager to be off, plays with its bridle, but close under the fort where Hastings and Hane had fired the incombustible balls he saw the Capsina's boat, a light caique, in which she sailed on her hurricane errands when in port, which would go like a fish if there was wind, and could be pulled by one man. Even Mitsos, used as he was to over-canvassed boats, used to feel certain qualms when the little cockleshell, with its tower of sail, was scudding through a broken sea. But the Capsina, knowing this, used to watch his face for any sign of apprehension, till he, seeing her, would exclaim:

"It is as a bird with wings and no body, and that is not the safer sort of bird; and oh, Capsina, drowning is a cold manner of death. Oh yes, hoist more sail, by all means, and I shall pray the while."

It was the day after Poniropoulos had told Hastings that his services were no longer required, and both Poniropoulos and the gunners under Hastings were feeling a thought disconcerted. The Capsina had approved very warmly of that silent and iron man, and when, on going that morning to the fort, she had found Hastings gone she sailed across with dipping gunwale to Poniropoulos and demanded where and why he had disappeared.

Thus Poniropoulos learned her true opinion of him, and she went back to the island where Mitsos found her.

"Ignorant folk," she had been saying, "always think that no one is so wise as they. When you came here you knew nothing. You have been taught to fire off a gun without getting in front of it, and you think you know all. Why did you let Hastings go? What did he care about the plunder of Nauplia? If you had asked him to stop, he would have stopped. You know that as well as I. He saw that if you continued to fire the big guns the fort would tumble about your long ears. So what have you done since? Eaten garlic and talked about piasters! Oh, I will teach you!"

To her, shaking her fist, Mitsos appeared in the doorway. She looked up once, dropped her eyes, and looked up again. Then she turned to the gunners.

"Go away, pigs, all of you!" she cried. "He and I will talk things over, and there will soon be orders. The place must be repaired at once."

And she stood there, looking out of the window, till the men had filed out.

Then Mitsos approached.

"Capsina," he said, "I have seen Suleima. She has told me--"

He did not pause in his speech, but as he said those words, the color was already struck from the girl's face, leaving it as white as a lamp-globe when the light is extinguished, for, for the moment, she thought Suleima had told him all. She turned a little more away from him.

"She has told me what you have done for me and mine," he went on, "how you saved her; how you put yourself between her and death. And I--God made me so stupid that I cannot even find words to thank you."

It was a glorified face that turned to him one smile.

"Oh, little Mitsos!" she said. "Surely we do not need words for such things. When you saved my life at Porto Germano, did I thank you for it? I think I only said, 'How slow you are,' when you picked up my knife for me. So that is finished. We had a long talk, we washed and dressed the littlest one, and he said 'Capsina.' That pleased me in an extraordinary manner, but you remember that I like children. And Suleima is a fine woman, a woman, yet not foolish, the sort of woman that does not make one wish to be a man, and those are rare. So I approve, but I doubt whether she is severe enough to you. A wife should not be too full of care for the husband."

"Indeed, I have been speaking to her to-day," said Mitsos, "saying she is not careful enough of me. A wife should be able to sew and mend, should she not? And see what a shirt she has given me."

And Mitsos pulled his shirt-sleeve round till the patch was shown, and made a marvellously poor attempt to look grave; and, each seeing that the other knew, they burst out laughing, and the Capsina gave Mitsos a great slap on the shoulder.

"Boy and baby you will always be," she said. "And now, do you know anything of fortification work?"

"Not a thing."

"Nor do I. So we will patch up this fort, learning, as is right, by experience, and may the Virgin look to those within when we have done our mending. It is as safe as a tower of bricks that a child builds. Lad, Hastings is a brave man to stand firing the guns here with his hands in his pockets."

"The others are as brave."

"No. They did not know the danger; in fact, they knew nothing. Look at that piece of wall there! If you look hard, it will fall down like a Turk. Oh, Mitsos, if you had given the time you spend in tobacco to learning building, you might be of some use this day."

"If you wish, I will push it, and it will fall," remarked Mitsos.

The Capsina looked at his great shoulders and sighed.

"If only I had been born a man!" she said. "Oh, I should have liked it! If I pushed it now--"

"If you pushed it," said Mitsos, "you would push with all your weight. So when it fell out, you would fall with it, eight feet to the beach below; also your petticoats would fly."

The Capsina struggled with inward laughter for a moment.

"It is likely so," she said. "Therefore show me how to push it."

The fragment of wall which Mitsos was to push outward was a rotten projecting angle once joining a cross-wall, but now sticking out helplessly, in the decay of the others, into space. It was some six feet high, and the top of it on a level with Mitsos's nose. He looked at it scornfully a moment, and then at the Capsina.

"It shall be as you will," he said, "but I shall dirty my beautiful clean shirt, even tear it perhaps on the shoulder, and who shall mend it again for me?"

"Push; oh, push!" said the Capsina. "Be a little man."

Mitsos braced his shoulder to it, wedged his right foot for purchase against an uneven stone in the floor, and his left foot close to the wall, so that he could recover himself when it should fall outward. Then with a fine confidence, "You shall see," he said, and butted against it as a bull butts, sparring only half in earnest with a tree. Wall and tree remain immovable.

"That is very fine," said the Capsina. "It nearly shook."

Mitsos put a little more weight into it, and felt the muscles tighten and knot in his leg, and the Capsina sighed elaborately.

"It would have saved time to have picked it down stone by stone," said she. "But never mind now; no doubt it is trembling. What a great man is Mitsos!"

Half vexed--for, with all his gentleness, he was proud of his strength--and half laughing, he put his whole weight from neck to heel into it, doing that of which he had warned the Capsina, and felt the wall tremble. Then pausing a moment to get better purchase with his right foot, once more he threw himself at it, making a cushion of the great muscles over the shoulder. This effort was completely successful; the wall tottered, bowed, and fell; and Mitsos, unable to check himself, took a neat header after it and disappeared in a cloud of dust.

The Capsina, who had perfect faith in his power of not hurting himself, peered over the ledge with extreme amusement. Mitsos had already regained his feet, and was feeling himself carefully to see if he was anywhere hurt.

"Little Mitsos!" she cried, and he looked up. "You will want a new petticoat as well as a shirt," said she.

They spent an hour or two in the place, deciding on what should be patched up, and what pulled down, and the Capsina took Mitsos back with her to the _Revenge_ to sup before he went home. The two were alone. Mitsos had much to tell of the siege of the Larissa and the destruction of Dramali's army, and to the Capsina so much still remained of that spell of soothing which Suleima, and even more the child who stammered her own name, had cast upon her, that she listened with interest, excitement, suspense, to his tale, and even half forgot that it was Mitsos who told it. But when it was over and they were on deck, half-way between silence and continuous speech, she began to think again of that which filled her thoughts. She was sitting on a coil of rope, and he half lay, half sat, at her feet, leaning against the fore-mast. The night was very hot and dark, for the moon was not yet up, and the starlight came filtered through a haze of south wind. Mitsos smoked his narghile, and as he drew the smoke in his face was illumed intermittently by the glowing charcoal, lean and brown and strong, and the jaw muscles outstanding from the cheek, and again as he stopped to talk he would go back into darkness, and the words came in the voice which she thought she knew even better than his face. Sometimes in a crowd of faces she would think she caught sight of him, but never in a company of voices did she catch note of a voice like his. And though she knew that when he had gone, for every moment he had sat close to her in the warm, muffled dusk she would sit another minute alone, helplessly, hopelessly, with his voice ringing in the inward ear, she still detained him, laughing down his laughing protests, saying that he thought of himself far higher than Suleima thought of him.

At last he rose to go in earnest, and she went with him to the boat.

"Soon the Turkish fleet will be here," she said, "and then there will be work for us, little Mitsos. Shall we work together again?"

Mitsos raised his eyebrows and spoke quickly:

"How not? Why not?" he said. "Will you not take me again?"

"I? Will you come?" she asked.

"Yes, surely. But I thought you spoke as if, as if--"

"As if what?" asked the girl.

"As if you thought we should not be together."

"Oh, little Mitsos, you are a fool," she said. "While the _Revenge_ is afloat there is need for you here. Good-night. Kiss Suleima for me, as well as for yourself, and promise you will make the adorable one say 'Capsina.'"

"Indeed he shall, and many times. But when will you come yourself? I have not yet welcomed you in my home, and for how many days have I been made welcome in this swift house of yours! You will come to-morrow? Let me tell Suleima so."

The Capsina nodded and smiled.

"Till to-morrow then," she said.

But Mitsos had construed her tone aright. Even in the very act of speaking she had hesitated, wondering if she were firm enough of purpose to sail without him, and wishing, or rather wanting, that she were; and in the same act of speech she had known she was not, and the question had halted on her tongue. But it had been asked and answered now, and she was the gladder; for the pain of his presence was sweeter than the relief of his absence.

Most of the sailors were on shore, a few only on the ship, and when Mitsos had gone she went down to her cabin, meaning to go to bed. The ripple tapped restlessly against the ship's side; occasionally the footstep of the watch sounded above her head, and human sounds came through the open port-hole from the Greek camp. The night was very hot, and the girl lay tossing and turning in her bed, unable to sleep. It was at such times when she was alone, and especially at night, that the fever of her love-sickness most throbbed and burned in her veins. Now and then she would doze for a moment lightly, still conscious that she was lying in her cabin, and only knowing that she was not awake by the fact that she heard Mitsos talking or saw him standing by her. Such visions passed in a flash, and she would wake again to full consciousness. But this night she was too aware of her own body to doze even for a moment; it was a struggling, palpitating thing. Her pulse beat insistently in her temples; her heart rose to her throat and hammered there loud and quick. The port-hole showed a circle of luminous gray in the darkness, and cast a muffled light on the wall opposite; the waves lapped; the sentry walked; the ship was alive with the little noises heard only by the alert. Her bed burned her; her love-fever burned her; she was a smouldering flame.

She listened to the tread of the watch, growing fainter as he walked to the bows; he paused a moment as he turned, and the steps came back in a gradual crescendo, till he was above her head, then died away again till they were barely audible. Again he paused at the turn, again came his steps crescendo, and so backward and forward, till she could have cried aloud for the irritation of the thing. Other noises were less explicable; surely some one was moving about in the cabin next hers, the cabin Mitsos used to occupy, some one who went to and fro in stockinged or bare feet, but with heavy tread. Then Michael, who lay outside her door, stirred and sat up, and began to scratch himself; at each backward stroke his hind-leg tapped the door, and the Capsina vindictively said to herself that he should be washed to-morrow. But he would not stop; he went on scratching for ten hours, or a lifetime, or it may have been a minute, and she called out to him to be quiet. He lay down, she heard, with a thump, and, pleased with the sound of her recognized voice, banged his tail against the bare boards. Then he began to pant. At first the sound was barely audible, but it seemed as if he must be swelling to some gigantic thing, for the noise of his breathing grew louder and louder, till it became only the tread of the sentry above. No, it was not the sentry; he walked a little slower than the panting--why could the man not keep time?--and still next door the padded footstep crept about.

Flesh and blood could not stand it, and getting up, she kindled her lamp at the little oil-wick below the shrine of the Virgin at the end of her cabin, and opened the door. Michael hailed her with silent rapture and wistful, topaz eyes. She paused a moment on the threshold, and then opening the door of Mitsos's cabin, went in, knowing all the time that the tread of the stockinged feet was only a thought of her own brain made audible inwardly.

The cabin was empty, as she expected, and she sat down for a moment on the bare boards of his bunk, with the lamp in her hand, looking round the walls vaguely but intently, curiously but without purpose. Some pencil scratches above the head of the bed caught her eye, and, examining them more closely, she saw they were sprawling letters written upsidedown and written backward. She frowned over these for a moment, and then the solution drew a smile from her; and putting the lamp on the floor, she lay down on the bed, looking up. Yes, that was it. He must have written them idly one morning lying in bed. And she read thus:

"This is Mitsos's cabin.... Suleima!... Capsina!... Oh, Capsina!... Oh, Mitsos Codones!... Suleima!..."

Again and again she read them, then continued to look at them, not reading them, but as one looks at a familiar picture, half abstractedly. The lamp, unreplenished with oil, burned low; Michael sank on to his haunches, and then lay down. Through the open cabin door filtered a silvery grayness of starlight, but before the lamp had gone quite out the girl was asleep on the bare, unblanketed bed, her face turned upward as she had turned it to read the little pencil scratches.